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Earlier this year AMD announced the Ryzen AI Halo as their in-house mini PC offering built around their leading Ryzen AI Max+ " [2]Strix Halo " platform. After [3]pre-orders began last month , the Ryzen AI Halo is officially beginning to ship this week and over the past few weeks we have been testing it out at Phoronix.

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The AMD Ryzen AI Halo is a mini PC built for local AI development and local inferencing. With 128GB of unified memory with the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395, it can support up to 200 billion parameter large language models and comes in a very compact and power efficient design while offering competitive performance to the likes of NVIDIA DGX Spark / GB10.

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With using the x86_64-based Strix Halo platform, the AMD Ryzen AI Halo can run either Microsoft Windows 11 or Linux. As separately shared this morning, when it comes to Linux shipping on the device it's using [6]the Debian-derived AMD Ryzen AI Developer Platform operating system . Check out that article for all the interesting software details. It exceeded what I was expecting of rather just a stock Ubuntu install with ROCm or similar setup.

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AMD will be introducing a version of the Ryzen AI Halo using the Ryzen AI Max 400 series "Gorgon Halo" but what's shipping now is the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 "Strix Halo" model with 128GB of LPDDR5x-8000MT/s unified memory and Radeon 8060S graphics. The AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 is over a year old now but it still offers excellent performance capabilities between its sixteen Zen 5 cores and the impressive Radeon 8060S graphics. I can't remember a time in the past 22 years of reviewing Linux hardware on Phoronix that I have remained as impressed and interested in a CPU/SoC one year after launch as I have been with the satisfaction out of AMD [8]Strix Halo .

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Beyond the powerful Ryzen AI Max+ 395 SoC itself, the Ryzen AI Halo device comes with three USB-C ports, USB-C based power delivery, 10 Gbps Ethernet, WiFi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, and an HDMI 2.1b output. It's unfortunate just one HDMI output with no dedicated DisplayPort outputs (USB-C to DisplayPort does work), but at least now we are beginning to see the HDMI 2.1 support on the AMDGPU driver side. For storage there is a 2TB PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD.

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The AMD Ryzen AI Halo measures in at just 150 x 150 x 45 mm and weighs less than 1.2 kilograms. The TDP on the device is 120 Watt.

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[1] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=amd-ryzen-ai-halo&image=ryzen_ai_halo_1_lrg

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Strix+Halo

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Ryzen-AI-Halo-Pre-Order

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=amd-ryzen-ai-halo&image=ryzen_ai_halo_2_lrg

[5] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=amd-ryzen-ai-halo&image=ryzen_ai_halo_4_lrg

[6] https://www.phoronix.com/review/ryzen-ai-linux-os

[7] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=amd-ryzen-ai-halo&image=ryzen_ai_halo_5_lrg

[8] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Strix+Halo

[9] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=amd-ryzen-ai-halo&image=ryzen_ai_halo_6_lrg

[10] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=amd-ryzen-ai-halo&image=ryzen_ai_halo_7_lrg

[11] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=amd-ryzen-ai-halo&image=ryzen_ai_halo_8_lrg